Literary Allusion in Harry Potter

Beatrice Groves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138284678
• eBook ISBN: 9781351978729
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Allusion in Harry Potter builds on the world-wide enthusiasm for J. K. Rowling's series in order to introduce its readers to some of the great works of literature on which Rowling draws. Harry Potter's narrative techniques are rooted in the western literary tradition and its allusiveness provides insight into Rowling's fictional world. Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Harry Potter and a canonical literary work, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, Ovid, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and the novels of Austen, Hardy and Dickens. This approach aims to transform the reader's understanding of Rowling's literary achievement as well as to encourage the discovery of works with which they may be less familiar. The aim of this book is to delight Potter fans with a new perspective on their favourite books while harnessing that enthusiasm to increase their wider appreciation of literature.

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1 Harry Potter, Greek myth and epic storytelling

Children’s literature remains uniquely connected with ancient, oral, traditions of storytelling for – unlike most modern writing – children’s stories are still spoken aloud. Harry Potter has been listened to by millions of children, read aloud by parents, friends, siblings and in audiobook form. Rowling has spoken of how satisfying she finds it that her books are being read aloud: ‘there’s nothing more gratifying than to listen to people saying that entire families read the books together . . .. They read one chapter together and then they gathered again to read the next one . . .. A lot of families told me they did that and that is gratifying in so many levels. The books have become a social act’ (2008b). While Rowling is not a true oral storyteller (she writes down stories that others read out, rather than retelling works from memory) Harry Potter connects with the oral storytelling tradition both in the way her stories are consumed and in the ways in which they are constructed.

This chapter argues for the influence on Harry Potter of one of the oldest forms of spoken story that we have: the epic poems of Homer. Rowling studied Homer as an undergraduate and has spoken of how deeply moving she found him (2000j). Aspects of Harry Potter – such as the Veela who derive from the Sirens in the Odyssey (Spencer, 2015, pp.31–2, 201) and the return of Cedric’s body – show the influence of Homer upon the series. The clearest influence, however, lies in its hero’s scar. Rowling has described how his scar marks Harry out: ‘I wanted him to be physically marked by what he has been through. It was an outward expression of what he has been through inside. I gave him a scar in a prominent place so other people would recognise him’ (2001b). In the Odyssey Odysseus returns home to Ithaca (after ten years fighting at Troy and ten years wandering at sea) and is recognised by his scar. When Harry returns to the Wizarding world – after ‘“ten dark and difficult years”’ (Phoenix, Chap 37, p.736) – he is likewise recognised by his scar. This scar plays a regular and prominent part in the narrative, both when it pains Harry and every time that he meets someone new and their eyes perform ‘the familiar flick upwards to the scar on Harry’s forehead’ (Goblet, Chap 7, p.81). The scar is crucial to Harry’s delineation as a hero, and for many years Rowling intended ‘scar’ to be the final word of the series (2007e).

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Harry Potter is in many ways an ordinary boy with whom children can identify – he gets detentions, frets over homework and endures bullying teachers – but his scar marks him out as a hero in the classical mould. While he remains an Everyman-style hero – ‘a normal boy but with those qualities most of us really admire’ (Rowling, 1999c) – he is also a descendant of the scarred hero of the classical imagination who returns from a long absence to revenge himself on those who have harmed his family.

Harry’s scar allows him to enter Voldemort’s mind, and it takes him to different places and times. Such ‘flashbacks’ are likewise a distinctive part of Homeric narrative (as will be discussed below in the famous example of the description of how Odysseus came by his scar). Homer’s abrupt breaks in the dominant time-line are linked to his oral composition, and it is a narrative device of which Rowling is so fond that she has given it a local habitation and a name: the Pensieve. Throughout the series the Pensieve becomes progressively more important. In Deathly Hallows Harry finally enters Snape’s memory at the height of the Battle of Hogwarts to learn the truth about the past and what that means for his future. At crucial moments of high plot tension both Homer and Rowling use the technique of an embedded story to take the reader back into the past.

‘I BOUGHT HIM OFF A GREEK CHAPPIE’: THE INFLUENCE OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE ON HARRY POTTER

Richard A. Spencer’s recent study of Rowling’s classical allusions provides evidence for the extensive influence of Greek and Roman myth, languages and literature on Harry Potter. The influence of classical languages on Rowling’s magical language has also been explored by M. G. Dupree (Dupree, 2011; Spencer, 2015, pp.246–72). Spencer is particularly interesting on the classical names of the series, noting that the goddess Minerva (like Minerva McGonagall) watched over schoolchildren and that the classical Cadmus (like Cadmus Peverell, the brother who asks for the Resurrection Stone) was engaged in a hopeless quest for a lost loved-one (2015, pp.70, 135).

Rowling read French with additional Greek and Roman Studies as an undergraduate at Exeter University in the early 1980s. The classical literature part of her course did not require her to read the texts in the original languages and she responded with immediate enthusiasm to the captivating stories and ‘ancient wisdom’ (Rowling, 2008d) she discovered: ‘tripping ecstatically off to the book shop to buy a stack of stylish black-covered Penguins’ (Rowling, 1998d, p.25). Rowling has written of how her undergraduate studies began a life-long enthusiasm for Greek literature: ‘a shelf next to me as I tap out these words is dotted with books on Greek mythology, all of which were purchased post-Exeter’ (1998d, p.27). Rowling studied Greek drama, Homeric epic and ancient myth as an undergraduate and became quite well informed enough to tell ‘a pair of bemused four year olds with whom I watched Disney’s latest offering that Heracles definitely didn’t own Pegasus. That was Bellerophon, as any fule kno’ (1998d, p.27). A friend who studied with her at Exeter has recalled how ‘Jo liked the Classics side of things. She liked those mythological stories’ (quoted in Smith, 2002, p.91). Ancient myth, with its fabulous beasts and ‘thrilling tale[s] of kidnap’ (Rowling, 1998, p.26), fired Rowling’s imagination and it is an indebtedness she wittily acknowledges when Hagrid explains that he bought his three-headed dog ‘“off a Greek Chappie”’ (Philosopher’s Stone, Chap 11, p.141). Fluffy’s Greek origins are a nod to the fact that he is a version of the three-headed dog of Greek myth, Cerberus.

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Harry Potter contains many creatures – such as Centaurs, Chimaera, the basilisk and the Sphinx – that originate in Greek myth. In the case of the Centaurs, in particular, their actions within Harry Potter resonate with their significance in Greek culture. As Spencer has noted, while Centaurs were generally considered as antagonistic to mankind, there was one (Chiron) who was particularly wise, kind and gifted and became a tutor to heroes such as Jason and Achilles – in a way that recalls Firenze (2015, pp.66, 191–2). Centaurs, however, were generally considered to embody an untamed barbarism that stood in contrast to Greek civilisation, most notably in their attempted rape of the Lapith women after they were invited to the Lapith wedding feast (which resulted in the famous mythological Battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, depicted on the Parthenon frieze). The importance of sexual violence in the Greek conception of Centaurs forms a disturbing undercurrent to the fate of Umbridge at their hands (McCauley, 2015, pp.135–6).

The influence of ancient Greek thought is also present in Harry Potter in quite subtle ways. It was the Greeks who first systematised medical study and, as Dupree has noted, this is probably the reason that the only two purely Greek spells in Harry Potter (Anapneo and Episkey) are connected with healing (2011, p.42). There may also be a more deep-seated link between Greek medical thought and another of Harry Potter’s spells. Rowling has described how she came up with the idea for the killing curse: ‘Avada Kedavra . . . is an ancient spell in Aramaic, and it is the original of abracadabra,¹ which means “let the thing be destroyed.” Originally, it was used to cure illness and the “thing” was the illness, but I decided to make it the “thing” as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine’ (2004b). Rowling’s creative impulse to make a killing curse out of a healing spell may have been inspired by the connections of hurt and healing in ancient Greek. Famously, the Greek word pharmakon can be translated either as ‘remedy’ or ‘poison’. (It is a concept that might hold a particular appeal for Rowling as a pharmakeus, one who hurts or heals, can also be translated as wizard or sorcerer – pointing to the way that magic can be used for good or ill.)

BEARING LIBATIONS: THE EPIGRAPH OF DEATHLY HALLOWS

It is the quotation from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers prefacing Deathly Hallows that makes the influence of Greek literature on Harry Potter explicit. Rowling has stressed the importance of these quotations (the other is from William Penn’s More Fruits of Solitude) to the series as a whole: ‘I’d known it was going to be those two passages since Chamber was published. I always knew [that] if I could use them at the beginning of book seven then I’d cued up the ending perfectly. If they were relevant, then I went where I needed to go . . . . They just say it all to me, they really do’ (2007g).

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The Libation Bearers is the central play of Aeschylus’ great dramatic trilogy (the Oresteia), which is one of the foundational texts of Western literature. It concerns the ill-fated House of Atreus and follows the cataclysmic results of Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to enable the Greek fleet to sail to Troy. The Trojan War is presented as a conflict that must be fought, and hence the decision to sacrifice Iphigenia is not presented as a free choice. Agamemnon, famously, ‘puts on the yoke of necessity’; but this is not an excuse accepted by his wife, Clytemnestra, who murders him in revenge when he returns. In the second play of the trilogy – The Libation Bearers – Electra (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s daughter) waits for her brother, Orestes, to avenge their father’s death and kill their mother. The Libation Bearers ends with Orestes murdering Clytemnestra, and the final play of the trilogy – The Eumenides – tries to unravel the weight of responsibility and guilt that Orestes carries for this deed and to find a way out of perpetuating this cycle of violence.

Harry Potter’s epigraph asserts that the sufferings endured by the House of Atreus – ‘the torment bred in the race’ – can only be solved from within the family itself: ‘there is a cure in the house,/and not outside it, no,/ . . . Bless the children, give them triumph now.’ It is Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, who must avenge his father’s death. The use of this quotation of an epigraph implies that the weight of responsibility for disentangling events will likewise fall on the young hero of Deathly Hallows. Dumbledore has died and the children must go it alone. It is Harry who will face Voldemort, Harry who must avenge his parents, as he had somehow always known it would be: ‘it was always going to be a quest really to avenge them’ (Rowling, 2007l).

As the use of this quotation suggests, Harry Potter draws on Greek tragedy’s belief in family as destiny. The House of Atreus – the family into which Orestes is born – is cursed because of the ancient sins of its first founder Tantalus. Tantalus curses his successors by sacrificing his son, Pelops, and feeding him to the gods. The gods – horrified by this act – return the boy to life. (Incidentally, they do this by boiling his body parts in a sacred cauldron – a resuscitation that may have inspired Voldemort’s odd mode of resurrection at the end of Goblet, when he comes back to life by boiling various body parts in a cauldron.) Pelops then fathers Thyestes and Atreus, only for history to repeat itself when Atreus murders Thyestes’ son (also, unpropitiously and confusingly, called Tantalus). Atreus is the father of Agamemnon and Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter is prefigured in his great-grandfather’s sin: like Tantalus, Agamemnon sacrifices his child for the gods. The Oresteia illustrates the enslaving nature of the system of blood vengeance: Agamemnon kills his daughter, so his wife kills him, so their son kills her.

One reason that Deathly Hallows begins with a quotation from the Oresteia is that Harry Potter, too, is interested in the idea of generations replaying the actions – and sins – of their predecessors. Harry’s group of friends, for example, play out the relationship dynamics of his father’s circle (Asher-Perrin, 2013; Bartel, 2015). In Harry Potter, as in Aeschylus, your parents are your fate. At the end of Deathly Hallows, Harry seems intent on seeing that the bad blood between him and Draco should continue between their children. Strikingly, however, Rowling has chosen to break this cycle in the 2016 play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (written by Jack Thorne, but based on an original idea by Thorne, Rowling and John Tiffany). In this play Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy become best friends. Within the Harry Potter novels themselves, however, there are also glimmers of hope that the endless cycles of enmity can be broken.

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The Oresteia concludes with the miraculous ending of violence in which the House of Atreus has become embroiled and there is a hint of such a rapprochement in Hogwarts likewise. On Christmas Day in Azkaban Dumbledore pioneers the idea of sitting together without the division of House tables and it is an idea that comes to fruition at the end of Deathly Hallows. After the Battle of Hogwarts the traditional enmity between Gryffindor and Slytherin has been broken along with Voldemort’s power: ‘nobody was sitting according to house any more: all were jumbled together, teachers and pupils, ghosts and parents, centaurs and house-elves’ (Chap 6, p.597).

The quotation from The Libation Bearers suggests a parallel between the weight of destiny carried by Orestes, and that which is being placed on Harry’s shoulders. But there is also another clear link between the two heroes: they both have a scar on their forehead. As John Granger has noted: ‘there are no other “young men coming into his own stories” that I know which feature a boy with scar on forehead prophesied and determined to avenge the murder of his father’ (2008b). The myth of Orestes states that he has been long absent (sometimes the myth runs that – like Harry – he was sent away as a baby) and so when he returns in The Libation Bearers it is difficult for his sister to recognise him. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers Electra knows that her brother has returned because she finds a lock of hair that looks like her own left at their father’s tomb and a footprint identical to her own. In Euripides’ version of the story, however, Orestes is recognised through the ‘scar on his brow.’ Euripides is a rather irreverent dramatist and his version of this story, in his Electra, parodies Aeschylus’ recognition scene in the Libation Bearers. Euripides – the only Greek tragedian who finds a place for comedy in his plays – points out some of the inconsistencies in Electra’s traditional recognition of her brother. In Euripides’ play...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Literary Allusion in Harry Potter
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts Use
• Introduction
• 1 Harry Potter, Greek Myth and Epic Storytelling
• 2 Naming in Harry Potter: Plato, Shakespeare and Ovid
• 3 Harry Potter’s Medieval Hallows: Chaucer and the Gawain-poet
• 4 The Temptation in the Desert and the Harrowing of Hell: Harry Potter, Mystery Plays and Milton
• 5 Comedy, Tragicomedy and Shakespearean Influence in Harry Potter
• 6 Jane Austen: Rowling’s Favourite Author
• 7 Brewing the Language of Love: Victorian Novels, Sonnets, Shakespeare and Snape
• 8 In Memoriam
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index